Monthly Archive: June 2013

When I wrote my first blog post about my new BlackBerry Q10 a week after I’d acquired it, I was basically happy. Worth the wait, I said. Now that six more weeks have passed, I can say that I like the phone, texting, the camera and the ability to share photos. But I am revising my overall view and am joining the growing chorus of frustrated owners. I am still having trouble, as I indicated earlier, knowing what type of action to use and with what amount of vigour. When closing contacts or calls on the screen, you have to use...

I was busy last week and did not see Peter Mansbridge interview Pamela Wallin. No one I’ve asked watched the show either which may say something about The National and the diminished size of its audience. Fortunately, in this day and age, everything is available, including a complete transcript. I watched a video of the 36-minute interview, read the transcript and I must say that I still don’t fully understand Wallin’s problem. It’s not her residency, that’s all been approved. It’s not charging per diems for Senate work when she’s on holiday as Mike Duffy has allegedly done. Wallin claims she doesn’t...

Sears Canada has been in decline for half a dozen years but the news today that it will be closing its stores in Yorkdale, Square One and maybe Scarborough Town Centre – three of the busiest malls in the Toronto area – mean that the company is finished with Canada. It’s ironic, given that Sears Roebuck & Co. was the first of the U.S. department stores to come here. It was 1952 when General E. R. Wood, chairman of Sears Roebuck, struck a deal with Edgar Burton, president of Simpson’s, for joint ownership of the two companies’ catalogue and mail-order...

In the run-up to the 1972 federal election, when I was press secretary to then Opposition Leader Robert Stanfield, I wrote a research paper on the Pickering Airport proposed by the Trudeau Government. My conclusion: there was no need. More important, the majority of Torontonians didn’t want the airport. Yes, there was going to be a new airport built in Quebec, but Torontonians would not feel slighted if they didn’t get one, too. During the election campaign, as Pickering Airport became an issue, Stanfield decided he wanted to hold a news conference on the topic. But what to say? The...

While many magazines and other print journals are falling from the sky to their deaths like so many sparrows before the storm, one publication manages to carry on regardless of the economic headwinds facing the rest of its breed: Corporate Knights. Against all odds, the Summer issue just out is Volume 12, Issue 2. I presume that means it has been around for more than a decade which sounds about right in my memory, too. With a healthy 74 pages, Corporate Knights calls itself The Magazine for Clean Capitalism. Who can be against that? One of the stories ranks Canada’s...

My final 2013 property tax bill arrived today and was accompanied by a very interesting list that showed how our tax dollars are spent by the City of Toronto. The top four are predictable: police, fire, TTC and debt repayment. From the average homeowner who pays $2,532 (plus $1,005 in education tax) police services receive the most at $634. The surprising thing to me was what was at the bottom of the list – city planning – which gets all of $9.58. Less than $10 per average householder goes annually to fund the people and the department that looks to...